DABOH Milestones

Highlights in our history include consultations which took stock of the need for archives for mission and which gave encouragement to the development of bibliographies, electronic and print, and support to oral history.

Rome 1980 . . . A Working Party organized by the IAMS Committee on Documentation, Bibliography and Archives met in Urban University, Rome, 24 to 30 July 1980. The Working Party studied the implications of the “communication revolution” for missions studies. The Report Mission Studies and Information Management was released in microfilm, and can be downloaded at the Centre for the Study of Christianity in Asia website.  Andrew Walls and Willi Henkel convened the meeting.

Paris 1987. . . “Co-operation in Missiological Indexing”. A Workshop for representatives of institutions publishing missiological bibliography, or developing a missiological database. 5th-9th January 1987, at the Centre de Recherche Théologique Missionnaire, 5, rue Monsieur, Paris.

Rome 1988 . . . Documentation for a New Millennium of Mission

Basel 1990 . . .  DAB workshop on Mission Bibliographies at the Basel Mission in Basel, Switzerland, July 10-13,1990.

Hawai’i 1992 . . . At the 1992 IAMS Conference a statement on Archives for Mission was drawn up affirming that “if we lose our way to the past, we lose our way to the future.”

Rome 2002 . . . In Rome in 2002 the consultation Rescuing the Memory of Our Peoples led to the production of an archives manual designed to help churches and people around the world develop and safeguard their own archives resources.

Port Dickson 2004 . . .The DABOH Study Group in the IAMS Port Dickson Assembly 2004 undertook to translate the Archives Manual written by Martha Lund Smalley and Rosemary Seton into major languages of the world.  English, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Korean and Swahili versions of the Manual were produced by 2007. They are now available for free download at the Yale University Divinity School Library, Overseas Ministries Study Center, and the Centre for the Study of Christianity in Asia websites.   An oral history manual, Doing Oral History: Helping Christians tell their own stories by Jean-Paul Wiest is also available for download through the above links.  The Archives Manual is available in printed form from the Overseas Ministries Study Center.

Balaton 2008 . . .  From 16-23 August 2008, DABOH held a Conference on Mission and Memory: Documenting World Christianity in the 21st Century at Balaton, Hungary.  Click here for the papers presented at the Conference. A DABOH Panel of Reference was appointed after the Balaton Conference

Rome 2010 . . . A working group which consists of Michael Poon (chair), Marek Rostkowski (host), Jonathan Bonk, Andrew Walls, and Jean-Paul Wiest met in the General House of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate from 26 to 29 May 2010 to make plans for the DABOH meetings in Toronto 2012. Fr Marek Rostkowski  was appointed co-convener at the end of the meeting.

Toronto 2012 . . . DABOH held a mini-conference during the IAMS General Assembly in Toronto, 15 to 20 August 2012.